A very good, low-cost way of driving large volumes of traffic to your Web is by using a technique known as memetic marketing. In this article, we look at how Web Business Engineering was used to create this technique.

As a Web business entrepreneur, you can apply Web Business Engineering (WBE)
to discover innovative ways of using the Web to help your online business. Let's
take a look at a marketing application of WBE. Suppose that you aren't getting
enough traffic to your Web site. Using Web Business Engineering, I developed
a technique known as memetic marketing to drive large volumes of traffic to
my Web sites. With memetic marketing, instead of relying on search engines or
expensive advertising budgets, you use "memetics" to help your users
attract their friends and other acquaintances to your Web site. You can see
examples of memetics at my "Dating
Expert" Web site as well as my "Yes
No Maybe" Web site.

In the following article, I demonstrate how I used Web Business Engineering
to come up with the idea behind memetic marketing. To foreshadow, I used WBE
to analyze how information spreads offline and generalized the process to spreading
information online. But first, you need to understand what a meme is.
A meme is a pattern of information that spreads from person to person—and
oftenfrom generation to generation—in a culture. The meme is the
information analog of a gene. But whereas bodies contain and spread genes, minds
contain and spread memes. The classic examples of memes are religion and science,
but urban legends, catchy tunes, a good joke, and even words such as dilemna
(it's spelled dilemma) also qualify. The interested reader should refer
to Richard Dawkins' seminal book The Selfish Gene for a detailed explanation
of memes. My use of the term and concept may differ slightly from his, but the
basic idea is essentially the same.

Step 1: Mapping the Joke-Spreading Process

Suppose that you (U) go to a party, and someone (J) tells you a good joke.
The next day, you tell that joke to all your coworkers. Later that week, when
you get together with your friends for a game of cards, you tell them the joke.
Sometime during the month, when members of your family call—as family members
typically do—you tell them the joke. You can probably guess what happens
next: Your coworkers, friends, and family members (Fi) tell the same
joke to their coworkers, friends, and family members, who then tell their coworkers,
friends, and family members, and so on. This situation is depicted in Figure
1.

Of course, nowadays, besides telling jokes in person and over the phone, we
have technologies such as e-mail to help tell jokes; I'm sure you've all experienced
the thrill of receiving e-mail from a friend (F) who just discovered how to
use e-mail distribution lists and then forwards every joke that he or she comes
across (see Figure
2). You may even be guilty yourself of forwarding jokes in this manner!

This is basically the same diagram as the nontechnology case—some of the
labels have been changed to protect the innocent—but with an additional means
(email) of spreading the joke. This is a simple substitution of online media
(email) for offline ones. It turns out that we can do even better, but first
we need to understand why the joke spreads.